Ireland’s William Porterfield and Pakistan’s Sarfraz Ahmed show off a special trophy that has been put up for Ireland’s first Test match, which begins at Malahide on Friday.
Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

The day before the start of play they were still putting the finishing touches to Test cricket’s newest venue, the modest, pretty little ground at Malahide. So over the top of the pick-pack-pock-puck of the practising batsmen there was the sound of workmen hammering and drilling, fixing loudspeakers on the scaffold grandstands and new hoardings around the impermanent pavilion. Down the road a man was putting a fresh coat of paint on the railings by the station. The Irish have been waiting, working, a long time for this first Test match and want everything to go just so.

“It’s been quite a while building up to this since it was announced,” said Ireland’s captain, William Porterfield. “I am sure there will be a lot of different emotions that will flow through everyone in the next 24 hours.” Mainly excitement, he said, but some anxiety, too. The pitch is green, the forecast awful and Pakistan have a formidable attack. Ireland aren’t short of first-class experience – they’ve more of that than this callow Pakistan side – but Boyd Rankin is the only man among them who has ever played a Test.

So even Porterfield, 33, and Ed Joyce, 39, aren’t quite sure how they will handle it all. The team had a long chat with Marcus Trescothick after their warm-up match against Somerset to get a better idea about what to expect. “He talked about the experience of playing Test cricket and how the standard is just that little higher than county cricket, how it’s more relentless,” Porterfield said. It was nothing they had not heard before from their coach, Graham Ford, but Porterfield still found it reassuring.

The captain and his team are acutely aware that they are not just representing themselves, but all the Irish cricketers before them, the men who never had the chance to play a Test. “It would be remiss if we didn’t talk about everything that has gone before us. Not only over the last five or 10 years, which everyone remembers, but about every cricketer who has ever played for Ireland. On and off the pitch, administrators and a lot of people have devoted a lot of their lives to make this happen.”

Cricket has a long history in Ireland. There were playing in Phoenix Park back in 1730, and by 1860 it had become one of the most popular sports in the country. There were around 300 clubs in Ireland at that point and the national team waswere strong enough to beat MCC by an innings at Lord’s in 1858. Everything started to change when the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed in 1884, and then, at the turn of the 20th century, banned GAA members from playing or attending foreign sports.

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Back then, there wasn’t an Irish Cricket Union to protect or promote the sport. As a result the game, so strongly associated with England, dwindled in popularity. It became a minority sport, played in patches of Northern Ireland and middle-class areas of Dublin and Cork. The national team played annual matches against Scotland and tour games against counties and countries. They won some famous victories, against South Africa in 1904, West Indies in 1928 and 1969. But they were seen as beer matches.

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Even in the 1990s, when Cricket Ireland finally appointed their first full-time coach, Mike Hendrick, the game was an amateur affair, and often as not the players would have to covering their own costs. When Adrian Birrell took over as coach in 2002, he was told the boot of his company car was supposed to double up as a storeroom for the team’s kit. When Warren Deutrom became the chief executive in 2006, he was the board’s only full-time member of staff, with a part-time PA who worked four mornings a week.

It is fitting that Pakistan are their opponents in this first Test, since they were the team Ireland beat in their breakthrough game, on St Patrick’s Day at the 2007 World Cup, a three-wicket victory that put them on the front pages and to the forefront of associate cricket. After that, Deutrom pushed through the modernisation of the sport. The first professional contracts followed in 2009, an interprovincial domestic competition was launched in 2013 and now, 11 years after that win in Jamaica, they are at last being allowed to play Test cricket.

Porterfield played in that famous match in 2007. “It’s obviously been a long journey,” he said, “but in some ways a pretty quick journey as well.”

When Porterfield started, Ireland did not even have ODI status, “now tomorrow we’re going out there and playing the first Test match for Ireland”. Along the way there has been, he said, “a long banging of the drum”. And now it’s done, there’s excitement, anxiety, and more than either of those, the gratitude. “It just culminates with us being lucky enough at the time of our careers to be able to take the pitch to play that first Test match.”